In this video, I'm going to give you the tools and the process to perfect your Spanish pronunciation
through speech shadowing.
empe Hola amigos Jim here from Spanish and Go, your resource for learning real-world
travel Spanish.
And today, I want to give you the process that I use to work on my Spanish pronunciation.
Now I've been learning Spanish for the last ten years, and I think I've gotten pretty
good, and I want to help you improve as well.
Now accents and pronunciation or something we've talked about on this channel before
especially in our video about "How To Not Sound Like a Gringo."
I'll leave a link to that somewhere here, but in this video, i want to show you my exact
process for improving my own pronunciation so that you can copy it and improve yours.
Now one of the most difficult things about improving your pronunciation is that most
people tend to think that they're average or above average with their pronunciation.
Just as most people think that they're at least average if not above average drivers,
but the problem here is really that you don't hear yourself speaking a language the same
way other people do.
So let's start with the basics.
Now first off, you're really going to want to focus on mastering your vowel sounds.
In Spanish, there are very few silent letters.
It's really only the "h" that you have to worry about, and if you cover your vowels
and you have those down pat then most words are just pronounced the way they look like
they should be pronounced.
Unlike English, in Spanish you don't have weird things like "ph" in phone or "kn" in
knight.
If it doesn't sound like it should be there, it's not there.
Of course, there are exceptions as there are in any language, for example, you don't say
"Psicólogo" you say "sicologo," but in my opinion, Spanish pronunciation is easier to
understand than English pronunciation, at least in regards to how you should say things.
So fortunately, the vowels in Spanish are the same ones we have in English they're just
pronounced differently.
So there's A/E/I/O/U.
Notice as you go through that order your mouth starts from big and goes to small.
A/E/I/O/U.
So just keep that in mind when you're pronouncing these vowels.
Now you can be sure you're pronouncing these correctly by going to our website, we left
a tool there where you can listen to the Spanish alphabet and practice with that.
But I'm going to give you some tools coming up so you can practice and compare your pronunciation
with that on our website.
Next up, as you are practicing your Spanish, I want you to write down any words that you
find difficult to pronounce.
I take notes all the time of different Spanish words that I hear that I want to say for later
or practice.
And I basically have different categories.
One is just vocabulary; I know how to pronounce it.
I just want to save it for later so that I can look it up or remember it or add it to
my "Anki Stack" and then I can practice and make sure that I've really mastered the use
of that word, but another category I keep is words that are difficult for me to pronounce
and I add to this list a lot especially when May and I are recording our podcast learn
Spanish and Go.
If you're ready for real Spanish conversations, then you should definitely check out the podcast.
It's all in Spanish, and I mentioned this because every time I do a video by myself
in English, someone comments, "Why didn't you just say it all in Spanish?"
Well, not everybody is at the level where they can understand full Spanish conversations,
so if you are, check out the podcast.
So in preparing for this video, I grabbed a few words from my difficult words to pronounce
list so that I could walk you through my process of improving.
I wrote down an "Ejecutivo" (executive), "Envejece, "to age, "Acontecimiento" event.
Now often times you'll find that you can say a word out of context just fine, but when
you put it in a sentence that's where the trouble begins, and that's the same thing
for me, so I'm going to show you how you can work through that, but first you're going
to want to know how to pronounce the word as is.
Fortunately, there's a resource that shows you exactly how a native Spanish speaker would
say pretty much any word.
So all you need to do is copy the word that you want to practice and pop it into the unfortunately
named spanishdict.com.
For this example I'm going to grab the word that's giving me the most trouble right now,
so you can just go ahead and copy and paste that word into spanish dict, and you'll be
taken to a page where you can read the definition, see different examples, and listen to the
pronunciation.
I've never actually even gone to this tab before, but if you click here.
Acontecimiento ( ah-kohn-teh-see-myehn-toh).
Isn't that awesome a native Spanish speaker will pronounce the word as is and then slow
it way down.
But remember, as I mentioned before it's one thing to just copy someone, it's another to
hear yourself copying them.
That's how you're really going to be able to tell how close you're matching the standard
basically.
The person you're trying to copy a real native spanish speaker.
So I'm going to go ahead and listen again, and then I'm going to make my own recording
to compare a contest.
Acontecimiento ( ah-kohn-teh-see-myehn-toh).
Okay.
Let's give it a shot, so i'm gonna pull up a voice recording app on my phone and then
try recording.
Acontecimiento ( ah-kohn-teh-see-myehn-toh).
And I'm going to listen back.
Acontecimiento ( ah-kohn-teh-see-myehn-toh).
And I'm going to compare it to the standard.
Acontecimiento ( ah-kohn-teh-see-myehn-toh).
I'm going to try again, and then I'm going to copy every time she slows a part of the
word down.
Ah-kohn-teh-see-myehn-toh (Acontecimiento).
I think that was pretty good, but again this is just
going to show you where any glaring issues in your pronunciation are.
And as I mentioned earlier, I'll leave a link to all the resources in the description of
this video.
Now the next step is using it in context.
So fortunately, if you can't find an example from a movie or a show that you heard this
word in, you can go to the examples tab on the Spanish dict website.
Here's a good one, and it looks like they even have an audio example.
En realidad, mi acontecimiento va a ser un poco diferente (Actually, my event is goig
to be a little different).
In reality that sounds a little computerized, but I think that will be good enough.
So I'm just going to go ahead and try to copy what he says.
"En realidad, mi acontecimiento va a ser un poco diferente".
Back in the app.
"En realidad, mi acontecimiento va a ser un poco diferente."
And listen back.
En realidad, mi acontecimiento va a ser un poco diferente.
I tripped up.
En realidad, mi acontecimiento va a ser un poco diferente.
When you're going through this exercise pay close attention to the words that are tripping
you up and practice them at a slower speed and slowly build up to a faster version.
As a musician, this is all I ever really did when I was practicing my instrument.
If I wanted to learn a section of music, I would take that section and slow it way down.
As long as I could play it perfectly at a slower speed then I could gradually increase
the speed until I could match the recording that i was going for.
I recommend you do the same with language.
And coming up I'm going to give you a tool where you can slow down any audio and gradually
speed it up in that same way.
Now I'm going to show you an example of speech shadowing.
This is an awesome technique that you can use with pretty much any audio or video that
you hear, and it's a great way to not only improve your pronunciation but also your fluency.
So the steps for speech shadowing are like this.
First, you're going to want to find something that you want to shadow.
Find an actor or a YouTuber, what have you that you really like the sound of their voice
and especially a topic that they're talking about.
Go ahead and find a piece of audio that's worth copying, at least to you, right?
Something that you're interested in so that if you ever want to talk about this subject
well you have the experience of maybe shadowing someone who talks about the same sort of thing
that you like.
This is going to keep it interesting, and it's going to give you the motivation to really
nail this down.
To show you how it's done, I picked a sample from one of the videos on my friend Allen's
youtube channel.
As a YouTuber I picked a section of his video that I thought would be worth mastering.
So I'll show you that section right now.
So I'm here on youtube, and there's a few things that you should know about the controls
on youtube because you can practice most of this right here on the platform, so by using
the shift + comma and period keys together, you can slow down or speed up the audio you
can also use the left or right arrows to jump back or forward in time.
This is really useful because you'll want to jump back and practice these phrases over
and over again until you get them down.
So this is the part I want to copy.
So that was pretty fast what you're going to
want to do is copy down what you're going to mimic.
That way you have it in front of you and you can practice along a little easier that way
rather than having to memorize multiple sentences at once.
On youtube if there are subtitles available especially if the author created the subtitles
they should be pretty accurate otherwise if there's good audio on the video youtube sometimes
does a decent job at creating automatically generated subtitles.
You're going to want to compare to see how they do if you go this route, but I'll show
you how you can do this fairly quickly.
Allen doesn't have subtitles that he created himself here, but if you go here to the three
dots below the video you can go to open transcript, and it's going to open up this transcript
box right here.
Now I think it comes with the timestamps on you're probably going to want to turn those
off for this example, and you can just go ahead and copy the part that you want to reproduce.
Go ahead and copy that text and paste it into somewhere that's convenient for you.
You could write this down in a notebook or just put it in a text editor.
I already went through this process to make sure that I had written down everything that
Allan said in his video that I want to mimic.
So let's just go back to the video quick and make sure that I've got everything.
Looks pretty good.
Another tip if you want to make sure that you're able to go back to that section of
the video is to click the share tab and then click the box that allows you to include the
time stamp in the link.
So just go to share and click this box here and copy.
That's going to give you the link that will go straight to that part of the video for
your reference.
I went ahead and copied that here in my text document, so if you want to be able to go
straight back to that spot, you can copy that link and paste it directly into your browser,
and it'll take you to that spot.
Perfect.
Now what you're going to want to do is practice saying this section out loud a few times to
get warmed up and eventually move that speed up to regular speed.
Again you can do this on youtube but I find it a little more convenient to have the audio
in a different player so that I can loop it in a way that's easier to practice with.
I recommend using a piece of software called transcribe exclamation point.
If you want to use a youtube clip for practicing this technique, you can use something like
a 4k downloader, which allows you to download videos from youtube, and then from there,
you can cut the video down and just import that into transcribe.
And that's what I did here, so I have the audio and transcribed now and only the section
that I want to practice.
The great thing about having the audio in this program is I can very easily slow down
the audio to whatever speed I want.
So what I'm going to do is pull up the text, so i could practice along with this text at
a slower speed.
You can see on the screen here there's the quick option for 70 percent that might be
a little too slow.
You can actually make finer adjustments down here, but we'll give
this a shot.
You don't have to practice with the audio right away.
You want to get the rhythm down, so listen to the audio a few times and then practice
it on your own until you feel comfortable to practice along with the audio or video
that you're working with.
Another thing I like about this program is you can just select the part of the audio
that's causing you the most trouble.
So I'm going to go ahead and select this, and I can loop just that section.
So you get the idea take each part that's causing
you trouble.
Examine it listen to it back over and over again, grab the sections that give you the
most trouble, and slow them down until you really have that mastered.
So I've shown you how to pronounce difficult words and how to use speech shadowing to improve
your fluency and your pronunciation.
I'll leave a link to all the resources I used in this video in the description so you can
use them for yourself.
And remember el camino es el estino.
The journey is the destination.
Nos vemos pronto.